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Proving The Obvious: The Antitrust Laws Were Passed To Protect Consumers (Not Just To Increase Efficiency), Robert H. Lande

All Faculty Scholarship

Sometimes an entire field goes astray. When its dominant members make a major mistake, an opportunity arises for someone to say, "The emperor has no clothes." This is what happened to the antitrust world during much of the 1970s and 1980s. These circumstances gave me the opening and motivation to write the article that appeared in the Hastings Law Journal in 1982 (Wealth Transfers as the Original and Primary Concern of Antitrust: The Efficiency Interpretation Challenged, hereafter Wealth Transfers).